


This Mortal Condition

by Persephone



Series: Definition of Love [1]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: M/M, Military, POV Alternating, POV First Person, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-09
Updated: 2011-12-09
Packaged: 2017-10-27 03:02:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/290937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Persephone/pseuds/Persephone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For everyone there is a weakness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_For as reason – though subjected to God – is yet pressed down by this corruptible body, so long as it is in this mortal condition, it has not perfect authority over vice._

_\- Augustine_

I was there at the aftermath of the battle on October 5th, standing not far from Captain Winters when our regimental commander, Colonel Sink, promoted him to Battalion Executive Officer. Winters looked stunned, and was still standing there with a bemused expression on his face when Sink walked away. I gave him a few more moments to himself before I went up and offered him a cup of coffee.

He took it from me and thanked me distractedly, and I smiled at him. He lowered his head and stared into the cup. I touched his arm before leaving him alone to his thoughts.

I could only wonder what a man like him thought of a time like this, when with only a single Easy Company platoon under his command he had surprised, attacked and defeated two German companies, with only one dead on our side and fifty on theirs. He was already a legend to Easy’s men, but this was sure to make him one across the entire 101st Division.

I was not surprised. Until I first laid eyes on him in basic training in Georgia, I had never met a man like him, nor had I known, except superficially, that such a man existed. And I thought I had met every kind. He was unique among God’s creatures, a leader set above others in a time of great need – caring, loyal and steadfast.

There had been plenty of loud mouths in the Army while we trained to go to war, but he never made himself out to be better than the next man. While the others banged their way up the chain of command, his quiet light shone above them all and brought him to where God needed him to be for the good of the men. To the men of Easy Company, he was a godsend, and he was all but worshipped as such.

For me, it was much more complicated.

I knew I should not put a mortal man on a pedestal, and that worship and adulation belonged only to God, as did any love that consumed a heart with such burning. Fire in a man’s soul was reserved only for God in heaven.

But it was and had always been my way to fall into secret things. Errant, deviant behavior that even while engaged in I recognized as such. Such was the sum of my past. But I had buried and left it behind, in marshes and secret bends of shrouded riverbanks. I had overcome, and sought absolution.

But for nineteen years I had practiced no restraint, and when I laid eyes on him it was all I could do to keep my head on straight. I tried, but found I could not set certain things aside, and so was unable to overcome my desire to venerate him, with my body and with my heart. And two and a half years later, I still could not.

But I did not think it too wrong, as he was a good man. He moved me to make a worthier man of myself, which was the promise on which I now lived my life. So though I walked a fine line, I believed, I hoped, that where Captain Winters was concerned, I had an understanding with God.

It wasn’t until I got back to the small gas stove over which we were brewing coffee that I realized I hadn’t congratulated him on his new promotion. But it didn’t matter. He knew how we felt.  


* * *

____________________

  
The war was going to be over before I would ever finish my combat report on the October 5th action. We did such an outstanding job that day that I shouldn’t have been surprised when Sink offered me battalion. But I had still reeled from it. Now I knew why. I wasn’t meant to be _writing_ about combat, I was meant to be in it.

What was so great about being Battalion Executive Officer? I was a glorified clerk. Part of the problem was that I had to think through every sentence before I typed it, so that I wouldn’t make too many typing errors.

But the bulk of the problem was that I was bored out of my mind. Everyone was having fun except me. Administrative work was truly the worst kind of torture. Worse than sitting in a shallow foxhole with German artillery exploding over your head. And no amount of sighing made any difference.

I was still moping at my typewriter when the door to my office creaked open and heavy footsteps ascended the stairs. I was surprised to get a visitor so late at night. Nix was in all likelihood passed out somewhere with Harry, and I couldn’t imagine who else it would be.

Eugene Roe crested the stairs and stood at the topmost one, eyeing me.

I sat up in my chair.

I remembered that the first thing that happened after Sink stood with me among the remains of the October 5th action and made me Battalion X.O. was that Eugene walked up to me and offered me a cup of coffee.

He had looked thoroughly exhausted after having to tend to the wounded with Easy’s two other medics, but he had taken the time to provide that small extra comfort to the men, and to me. He hadn’t said much, but he had looked so proud. And he had given me a brief smile that I hadn’t forgotten.

I knew it was silly to be stuck on a smile I’m sure he didn’t even remember, but I could count the number of times I had seen him smile. He was an extremely efficient medic and seemed to expect the same level of performance from everyone around him. So when he smiled at me, I admit I would get ridiculously pleased that I had won his approval, and it would take me a while to get my head out of the clouds afterward.

Once, back at Toccoa, I was designated casualty in a training exercise, and he had cradled my head while he looked me over. He had talked to me the whole time, and I never told anyone, but I was sure he had been speaking to me in French, but it didn’t sound like French, and I swear I could understand what he had been saying. I had laid there staring up at him, listening to his strange voice, and he had smiled at me that time, and touched my face.

I always stopped myself from thinking about what would have happened if we hadn’t been in an open field. I think I would have touched his hair. At the very least.

I swallowed and looked at him officiously. “Eugene.”

“Why are you still up, Captain?” he asked.

I blinked. “I…”

His eyes narrowed even more, and I forgot what I had been about to say. I don’t know how he did it, but he sometimes made me feel like a kid in class about to give the wrong answer.

“Hey,” I suddenly realized. “I no longer command Easy in combat, therefore you are no longer my medic. I don’t have to take orders from you anymore.”

“Oh yeah?” he drawled, almost smiling. “What _are_ you doing?”

“Moping,” I replied, and sighed before I could stop myself.

He came into the room and sat on the bench against the left wall, even though there were empty seats on the other side of my desk.

“You still gotta sleep, though.”

“If I got anymore sleep I’m afraid I might wake up a hundred years from now and find our position overgrown by a forest.”

He made a soft grunting noise, which I assumed was acquiescence. “What’s keeping you up?”

“Combat report from fifth October. It’s so overdue it’s not even funny anymore.”

“Maybe I can help. I have a pretty good memory.”

“Really? Can you list our casualties? If you can’t, it’s okay. I’m going to get the list from—”

He stood up and came towards my desk. I stopped talking and watched him take a seat in front of me. He looked around the desk.

“Gimme a pencil and some paper,” he said. “I’ll write ’em down for you.”

I found the items and handed them to him. He scribbled for a while with his head down, occasionally stopping to purse his lips and think.

I sat staring at his face, hoping he wouldn’t look up and catch me. His hair was so dark, and I knew he was young, but his eyes seemed old. The small lamps around the room threw light on some parts of his face and left others in shadow.

We weren’t in an open field now, and everyone was asleep downstairs.

I made a conscious effort to keep my arms resting on my desk by picking up a pencil and fiddling with it.

It wasn’t as if I could ask to touch his hair. Some of the men said he was part Indian, but I had also heard he was full-blooded Cajun. I tried to imagine what his hair felt like.

He finished writing and I turned my gaze away before turning back and taking the list from him. I looked it over, and couldn’t help wondering if he could possibly have remembered twenty-two names correctly.

“It’s my job to know,” he said.

When I looked up his eyes were narrowed again, and I knew I had annoyed him. I immediately set the sheet of paper next to my typewriter.

“Of course,” I said briskly, nodding. I thanked him and began shuffling paper, trying to look purposeful.

“Is anybody gonna read the report over, sir? Make sure you don’t sell yourself short?”

I shrugged. “Nix probably will. I’ll say that I did what I was put in charge to do, Eugene. Nothing more or less.”

“Well, sir,” he said. “I was there. You did nothing _but_ more. When the rest of 1st platoon arrived at your position, the first thing I saw was you standing out in that no-man’s-land all by yourself, thinking.”

“Really?” I shook my head. “What I mean is, you saw me in the field from all the way down the dike?”

“Yes sir.”

“Huh.”

I hadn’t worried about the view from the south at the time because it was part of our line anyway. But I really should have. There were so many gaps in the line due to 2d Battalion’s diminished numbers, and if just one over-ambitious German rifleman had snuck onto the dike behind my position I would have—

“You’re the best thing that ever happened to the five-oh-six. Battalion’s lucky to have you, and it’s Easy’s loss, ain’t it.”

I stopped musing and stared at him. The space between us had filled up with just the sound of his voice, and he was concentrating his gaze on me. I started to feel hot.

“You got brains on you, Captain,” he said, reverently. “And that’s damn nice.”

I went from feeling a bit hot to feeling quite hot, while he remained seated forward in his chair with his elbows on his knees, gazing at me. I swallowed and lowered my eyes and resumed shuffling papers. I thanked him in a clear voice that surprised even me. I heard him stand up.

“Before you go, how _are_ the men, Eugene?” I asked. “I know it’s been raining almost constantly and there aren’t enough blankets. Are they still having to eat those awful British rations? Oxtail soup, for pete’s sake? It’s like nineteen-seventeen out there.”

“They’re good,” he said, and this time he gave me a smile. “And they’re also in good hands, Captain. You don’t have to worry now that Lieutenant Heyliger is in command. Boredom and bad command spell trouble, but we got both those problems licked.”

I smiled, thinking that most corporals would hesitate before blatantly implying that a commander had been incompetent, but not Eugene. Battalion HQ hadn’t hesitated to get rid of the lieutenant from Fox company who had immediately replaced me, bringing in Moose to replace him.

“A commanding officer who can’t make himself get out of bed to inspect the troops definitely has no business commanding Easy,” I agreed. “At least he was removed quickly.”

“Uh-huh,” Eugene said quietly. “He oughta count himself lucky he didn’t wake up with a missing appendix or something.”

My mouth opened in shock. Back at Toccoa, Easy’s then commanding officer Herbert Sobel had woken up one morning after a field training exercise to a small incision in his stomach. The general consensus was that the medics, who had never owned up to the act, had not in fact removed his appendix while he slept, but had only made the incision to scare him.

But Eugene wasn’t smiling. Jesus, was he implying they had actually mutilated Sobel?

Eugene pressed his lips together and raised his eyebrows. “Have a good night, Captain,” he said. “Get some sleep.”

~*~

Even without distractions I couldn’t make myself do the paperwork. But when Nix was always showing up for refills of his canteen from my footlocker, and with Harry trailing him to park his behind on the window ledge and give me detailed accounts of Easy’s firefights, there was no way to sustain interest in typing up inventory reports.

“Hey, you know, I think I’ve solved the mystery of Sobel’s incision. Doc all but owned up to it. I couldn’t believe it!”

Harry scoffed. “I’m sure that’s nothing for him.”

I looked at Harry. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t quote me on this, but I heard he used to be all kinds of bad back in the bayou.”

Everything stopped for a moment as my heart rose into my throat. “Are you serious?”

Harry snickered. “It’s just rumors, Dick,” he said, then squinted meaningfully.

I glanced at Nix, who as the intelligence officer might have something to add, but Nix was looking at me oddly. I clamped my mouth shut on what I had been about to say.

“You’re absolutely right, Nix,” I declared. “This type of gossiping is beneath officers.”

Harry started laughing in the corner, and I busied my hands with administrative duties while my mind tried to conjure up what special brand of bad they had in the bayou.

~*~

Dear God, I should have just stayed at battalion HQ.

But I had been bored, I had been dying for action with Easy, and I had been worrying endlessly over the possibility of German soldiers infiltrating the gaps in the line.

I knew Moose, who was now commanding Easy, patrolled the line, visited the men in the foxholes and outposts. When I called him up and asked him if he wanted to do an inspection at 2100 hours, I wish now he had said he had other duties.

I don’t know whether, if I hadn’t been talking with him, he would have remembered the password in time to prevent the soldier from shooting him full of holes.

But even as he went down, I had started reacting, not thinking, administering basic emergency aid using the items on his jacket. My hands were steady. Harry, whose command post had been the nearest to our location, had come running and _his_ hands were shaking, but mine were steady.

It wasn’t until we loaded Moose on a jeep and rendezvoused with Eugene, a stretcher, and an ambulance jeep that I realized I hadn’t been thinking, just reacting. I think now that the problem was that I hadn’t had a man shot down next to me in nearly a month.

When Eugene asked Harry and me questions we should have known the answers to, how much morphine we had shot into Moose, and I couldn’t respond, I knew I had made a terrible mistake.

Moose was a soldier under Doc’s care, and I had just thrown him into greater jeopardy.

Harry tried to give an explanation instead of an answer, and that pissed Eugene off even more. When he turned on us I lost control of my breathing. It hitched and caught in my chest and I couldn’t inhale around my heart slamming into my side. I might have tried to say something but immediately shut up when Eugene bulldozed over every and any excuse Harry tried to blurt.

He stopped dead in his tracks only to ram home his point that we were officers, and grown-ups, and should have known better than to lose track of something so vital as morphine shots, before he cut us one final look of disgust and hopped into the ambulance with Moose’s stretcher.

I jerked and leaped forward, slamming the door shut before Eugene had to do that as well, and stood stunned as the jeep sped off.

“Did we fuck up?” Harry asked in distress. “Jesus, I hope we didn’t fuck up on Moose.”

“Doc’ll see to him,” I heard myself rasping. And I had to see to Doc. “I’m going to the aid station.”

I should’ve let Eugene cool off before I went near him, but I couldn’t sit down and wait. I found a jeep and arrived at the barn serving as aid station ten minutes behind them, wracking my brain to think of just how many syrettes we had given Moose, so that Eugene could do his job and I could stop shaking.

I stood in the doorway, watching the medics race around Moose’s body with single-minded determination, hearing Eugene calmly talking to Moose, then instructing the room at large to prepare to evacuate him.

Frantic minutes ticked by as they worked, and then they were loading Moose back on a stretcher and rushing past me. I followed them out and waited until the stretcher was loaded into the truck.

“Eugene,” I whispered, grabbing his arm. “I believe it was three. I think we gave him three syrettes.”

He shoved away from the jeep’s back door and strode to the side of the barn, taking me with him.

When we were out of earshot he whipped around on me.

“Just because they got you _moping_ up at battalion does not mean you gotta lose your edge!”

Then he pushed around me and jumped into the back of the jeep and barked at the driver to get a move on.

This time, I didn’t watch them go.

~*~

Nix tried to tell me it was okay, Harry said he was over it and could handle another berating any old day. For a long time afterward I couldn’t think it through, even though I was clear on what exactly had happened. It was just the part involving Eugene that my mind would get stuck on, and all I would see was the utter look of disgust on his face. I had failed him.

I would never have believed I could feel so bad about anything.

I carried on with my paperwork, typed until my index fingers went stiff, while Easy sat in cold, shallow foxholes, went hungry, and engaged the enemy.

~*~


	2. Chapter 2

Through the month of November until its end, when the Canadians came to relieve us from our foxholes in Holland, I only got to see Captain Winters from afar. Ever since Moose’s injury, he had taken on his duties as Battalion X.O. with his legendary efficiency, and even though he still hung around waiting for Easy’s returns from firefights, it wasn’t the same.

I almost ceaselessly desired to be near him. I could close my eyes and think of the days when he would come by our foxholes and check on us and make sure that no matter how bad we had it, we knew we were not alone. While crouched awaiting a charge on a position, I could still look up and sometimes see his tall figure silhouetted against the sky, pulling out into the lead and commanding us to follow him.

It didn’t matter about Lieutenant Heyliger. He was recovering safely in an English hospital, while I was aching in my heart, so regretful of the way I had treated Winters. And yet I couldn’t talk to him, tell him I was sorry. It seemed like such a small thing now, for a man like him. I couldn’t even convince myself he still remembered the way I had behaved. But round and round it went in my head.

We were out of combat now and the men were living some semblance of a normal life again at the ancient French camp at Mourmelon. Aside from the scrapes they were getting into with the men of the 82d Airborne, I had nothing with which to occupy myself, except to think of Winters.

As I stepped out of a theater tent showing a Marlene Dietrich picture, a lady I was never comfortable watching for the wildness I sensed beneath her surface, Captain Nixon walked up to me and held out a piece of paper.

I eyed it for a few seconds, moving out of the entrance to the tent. Slowly, I took it from him and examined it.

“That’s a 24-hour pass into Paris. Dick’s already there.”

I looked up from the piece of paper and locked eyes with him.

Captain Nixon was a brilliant intelligence officer, probably the best in the entire division, and it was his job to figure things out. He and Captain Winters were inseparable and I’d be stupid to not know why, at least on Nixon’s part. I wasn’t about to play games with him.

And yet here he was sending me after Winters.

“Don’t you want to go to Paris yourself?”

“He asked me to,” Nixon replied, still looking directly at me. “But I said no.”

“How come?”

“For all sorts of reasons, but mainly because all I’ve heard about for the better part of a month is the fact that you’re mad at him.”

“He said that?”

“Yeah. He’s made some kind of connection back to when he cracked Lieutenant Schmitz’s vertebrae during their wrestling match before we jumped into Normandy. Remember, you gave him dirty looks the whole next day after that one.”

I briefly squeezed my eyes shut. Captain Winters had tried to make peace right before we boarded the C-47 and I had pulled my hand from his grip like a petulant child.

“I think he believes he’s racking up negative points and failing in your eyes,” Nixon continued. “Never mind having otherwise defeated whole German companies and helped push forward the Allied advance in the European Theater of Operations. But then, Dick’s always had perspective.”

Despite his attempt to maintain a light tone of voice, I did not fail to catch the note of anxiety in his voice. I didn’t meet his eyes. I shoved my hands in my pockets and stared over his shoulder at a row of parked jeeps.

“It just bothers me a lot when he oughta know better, Caption Nixon. He ain’t like the rest of us, and when he starts _acting_ like—”

Nixon raised a finger and pointed to my left pocket, where I had shoved the pass, and turned away. Then he stopped and turned back around.

“By the way, you might want to stay at a hotel called Château Deauville.”

~*~

When Captain Winters walked into the hotel lobby he went straight for the stairs, passing the cluster of tables and chairs that served as an indoor café. He didn’t see me sitting at one of the tables. It was past midnight and the café had closed a while ago, and the room was dark except for the glow of electric lights from across the street.

I had been waiting all day for him.

“Captain Winters,” I called softly.

He stopped in surprise and came over to me, peering in the darkness. When he saw me, he blinked, and slowly took the seat opposite mine. His eyes were wide and his mouth slightly open, but I could see he was figuring out how I came to be sitting there, and clearly ruling out providence.

There was a pot of coffee and two cups on the table, one on his side and one on mine. I poured small quantities into our cups, concentrating on the action, and set the pot back on the table.

“I got a letter from Moose,” he blurted suddenly. “He’s doing fine. He got promoted to Captain, and the British gave him the Military Cross for Operation Pegasus.”

“That’s good,” I replied. I hadn’t heard about the promotion. But I had known the lieutenant was fine, so I wasn’t going to be talking about him.

“I’ve been walking back from the other end of Paris most of the night,” he said, in a somewhat shaky voice. “I didn’t realize I’d taken the last train out and that none would be coming back in tonight.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, hoping he would stop soon. He looked impeccable in his dress uniform, not as though he had been walking for hours. But then, I didn’t want to be talking about that either.

“How did you get them to serve you after closing hours?” he asked.

He couldn’t seem to stop talking trivialities.

“I speak French,” I replied.

He laughed a little, but it only seemed to make him more nervous. In the next instant he took a deep breath and it all came out.

“Eugene,” he said, clearing his throat. “It wouldn’t be entirely true for me to say I haven’t had an opportunity to apologize about Moose. The _entire_ truth would be that I— Well, I couldn’t quite make myself do it because I was too ashamed. Had I been commanding Easy company I would never have let myself get so careless. I realize now that I should have said I was sorry at the time, and I would like to do so now. I’m sorry.”

I sat forward in my chair, watching him talk.

At last he ran out of steam. He lowered his eyes to the table and picked up his cup of coffee, keeping his eyes down as he sipped it over and over.

I felt just as desperate as he did, if not more so, but unlike him I had not had the right words with which to approach him. And for a while all I could do was sit there and love him for never being afraid to lead the way.

“I too came here to apologize, Captain,” I said quietly. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that. It couldn’t have been easy going from combat command to signing reports.”

He snorted softly. “Well, let me tell you that incident with Moose broke me of my whining. Your yelling certainly made a difference.”

I took the compliment for what it was, and took a sip of my coffee. As I lowered the cup I glanced up, and was taken aback to see that he was flushed all the way to the roots of his hair. He was colored a dusky rose that made him look like he had been dusted with ladies’ pink face powder.

I felt myself staring, but I couldn’t look away to give him a little privacy if my life depended on it. I had heard at Toccoa you could see this happen to him if you asked him if he had a date for Saturday night.

My head grew hot imagining what might be causing it at the moment.

He calmly took another sip of his coffee. “I would never have believed you could yell like that.”

I frowned down at the table, upset at myself. “It’s a terrible affliction, this wild temper,” I apologized. “I sometimes let it get the better of me, when I oughta know better.”

“You don’t seem like you would have a wild temper,” he whispered, placing his elbows on the small table and leaning closer.

The room seemed to slowly shrink around us, until it was just him and me and a dark, empty world. I folded my arms over my chest, then found myself chewing on my thumb. I suddenly felt as nervous as he had been when he first came in, for sitting as close as he was to me, he was flesh and blood now, not a statue on a pedestal. I wanted to be careful what I said to him.

“Did it used to get you into a lot of trouble?” he prodded. “Your temper, I mean.”

For long moments I said nothing, and the silence stretched between us. He gave up waiting for a response and let out a short, disappointed breath, sitting back in his chair.

“Yeah, it did,” I heard myself say slowly. “That, and other things.”

“What other things?” he asked breathlessly.

I glanced up and saw that he was still blushing. I lowered my gaze.

“Things you grow out of. Offer contrition for, move on from.”

He laughed, sounding more nervous than ever. “When I was sixteen I took my dad’s car without permission. And then of course that was the only time I got into a car accident. It was minor, but oh boy, you wanna talk about contrition.”

I felt a small smile pull on the corner of my mouth. “That’s good,” I said, and took a sip of coffee.

He closed his mouth and looked down at the table. “Why do I get the feeling joyriding isn’t the kind of _other things_ you’re referring to.”

“Cause it ain’t.”

He raised his head and looked at me. He was flushed pink probably from head to toe, but he was gazing unblinkingly at me as if entranced, and it took all my willpower to sit still and let him look his fill.

He was looking for my thoughts in my face, trying to follow them down avenues he really ought not. I could tell him where to look, where he could start where he himself was concerned. On a feverish night at the age of fourteen, euphoric from concoctions, wet from sweat and muddy water and blood, covered in streamers of clinging Spanish moss.

It had not been the first, nor would it be by far the last time the pack I ran with had done our ungodly things in deep muddy inlets while the rest of the world slept.

But it had been the first time I had seen a creature as exquisite as he, naked, on a glossy print photograph of the kind I had not previously known existed. In a sense he had been my first, and maybe it was why God put me under his care, and showed me patience when my heart refused to cease its yearning for him.

But I kept my mouth tightly closed and my thoughts out of my eyes, and when our silence only continued, he eventually let out a deep, resigned breath.

“Well,” he said. “I should get going. I’m going to be catching the early train back to camp.”

“But you have one more day left on your pass.”

He shrugged. “I can’t seem to relax in this city. Might as well get back and do more paperwork.”

“All right,” I said, slowly standing after him.

Usually I would pat his arm or back in farewell, but tonight I kept my hands at my sides. I was walking a tightrope as it was, concentrating with the effort of marshaling my thoughts like wild horses.

“What is it, Eugene?” he asked softly.

I forced appropriate words out of my mouth. “Good night, Captain Winters.”

He sighed so low I almost didn’t hear it. “Good night, Eugene,” he replied, and went up the stairs to his room.

~*~

He forgot to lock the door.

I had followed him upstairs, and when I hadn’t heard the lock engage I had waited for a little while, then knocked. There had been no answer and I thought maybe he was asleep, so I opened the door to see.

He was in there. In the bathtub. I could hear him moving around in it, breathing with a delicacy that belied his strength. I stood in the bedroom, to one side of the doorway leading into the bathroom, and pressed my fingertips against the wooden wall separating us, resting my forehead against it.

All it had taken was a look from him, and here I was.

I had not done anything like this in a long time, not counting quick grabs in dark foxholes. I had tried even then to keep it to a minimum, as all it would take would be one truly pleasurable experience, and it would once again get out of hand.

And then down I would go again, taking too much, running wild with my desires. Stumbling before God.

I tried to make myself think hard before I took this step.

But the harder I thought, the harder I became. His sighs, the sounds of his body moving in the water lapped at my body. He sounded drained, and I knew at the very least he would take comfort from one whose duty it was to provide it. I knew that he would take comfort from me.

But it wasn’t comfort I had in mind to give. And it wasn’t comfort he had been seeking in my gaze.

As my fingertips tensed into the splinters of our partition I leaned to the left until I could see him with one eye. He was sitting in the water with his eyes closed, his chest rising and falling gently. I stared at him for a long time.

When I stepped into the doorway my heart did not pound and I was no longer finding it hard to breathe, as I had come to my decision.

“Captain Winters,” I called out softly.

He didn’t hear me the first time. I did it again, then again, until he opened his eyes and turned his head. He wasn’t startled, but he was surprised. He stared at me, his mouth open and still.

“Eugene,” he said, with an inflection I recognized. “Are you okay? Is something wrong?”

Now I could hear my heart beating. “Nothing’s wrong, Captain.”

I remained where I was, as I knew he was a modest man. As I anticipated, as soon as he ascertained that nothing needed his command attention, he became aware of his state and slowly dropped his arms from the sides of the tub and into the water. Under the electric light his complexion slowly pinked.

“If nothing’s wrong,” he said softly, “why are you looking at me like that?”

I continued to look at him like that.

“Oh.”

I dropped my hands to my sides and stepped away from the doorway, into the light of the room. He remained sitting in the tub, watching me with eyes that had gone dark in a perfectly calm face. I clasped my hands together, grinding my fist into my palm, looking up the wall for a light switch.

The water sloshed and I looked back to see that he was getting out of the tub. I hadn’t thought he would ever do anything so bold, and was stupefied to see all of him. My imagination had been woefully inadequate.

He came and stood right in front of me, then took another step and was pressing into me. He was dripping, and I was hot in my dress uniform. He closed his hands over my jaw, lifting my face to his. He smelled like scented French soap. I closed my eyes and felt him breathe on me, on my cheek and across my mouth. I realized my hands were still clasped, pressed against my chest because I was stupidly afraid to touch him.

I pulled them apart and placed them on his chest, jerking when I felt his peaked nipples under my fingertips. I was no longer on the other side of the wall.

It was frightening, the speed with which it all came back to me. The intoxication of carnal pleasure, the terrifying freedom to wallow in it. Remembrances of pitch black shacks on the river, long abandoned to endless floods and the elements, to the great depression. To sinners like me.

I released a shuddering sigh, and then it was only me and him.

I held him by his waist and dipped my knees, taking him with me as I sank on my haunches, then onto my backside, then flat on the floor. He moved with me, but he didn’t kiss me until my head touched the floor. Then his mouth came over mine, and I felt his tongue in my mouth.

I ran my hands down back of his thighs and spread his legs, spreading mine and lifting my body into him. He was stiff and pressing into me, moaning, shifting his hips from side to side.

“Eugene, oh Jesus,” he gasped, and it was all he could get out before I began to devour him.

I broke our kiss and sank my teeth into his neck, felt him tense and shudder, and sank my teeth deeper. I scraped over his flesh, felt the pulse of his blood under my tongue, traced its path and sucked on it. It made me harder. I scraped down his neck, across his collar bone, unbearably close to release as I heard him mewling. I tried to disguise the sounds I was making so that he wouldn’t hear me grunt like an animal, but I was hauling him up, and he was rising up my body, and God, I was grunting.

I chewed my way down his chest and sucked on his nipple, clamping my arm across his back to hold him still, gripping a fistful of hair at the crown of his head. I felt desire rise in me like a hot wild thing and I treated him roughly, wanting to know, even if I could not later see, that there would be bruises on his voodoo white skin. I pulled on his hair and he arched into my teeth, he didn’t cry out, only let out a low, endless growl that I barely recognized as my name.

I let go of his hair, dug my fingers into the flesh over his heart, wrapped my legs around his and scratched his back deep and slow. He shuddered, dragged himself up my body until my tongue slipped into his navel. I shoved it deeper, and this time he cried out. He wrestled his legs from mine and gripped his cock and when I felt his knees dig into my armpits, when I felt the tip of his cock tease my lips, I wanted to warn him not to fuck with me.

But he was not some timid teenager with his knees in the mud, and he gripped the back of my head with both hands as he pushed in. I closed one hand around him and wrapped the other around his thigh.

Then he began to move, riding in my embrace like a primal force, the very last sensation I expected from him. It awoke other things in me, memories that even if my mind ever refused to think, my body would always remember. Acts of taboo, of ritual, of corrupting sacred things to test the hand of God. Out of youth and boredom, but not innocence.

It threw me into fire and the pounding of my heart became the pounding of drums, and I could feel the mud under us, I could hear the sounds of the night.

His cries became rhythmic, he thrust at an unbroken pace, faster and faster, twisting above me, bending backward and pulling me with him. Then he rose to his knees and spasmed, and I sucked him.

He fell forward, bracing himself on his hands, panting at the floor. I slid down his body and kissed up his thighs, sliding from under him to kneel behind him. I kissed every inch of his back, stroked his arms and nipples and stomach. I pressed my forehead into his back and brushed my cock against the back of his thighs. He gave me a soft murmur of approval.

He rose and I followed behind him, watching him walk, watching him lie down on the bed in the dim room, propping himself against the headboard. He lifted his hand and beckoned that I approach. When I got on the bed, dress uniform, jump boots and all, he spread his legs to accommodate me and began to undress me.

I helped him, and we worked in silence, though it seemed I could hear both our heartbeats. He glanced up at me only once, when I took the tiny tin of oil from my pants pocket and laid it on the bed. I, on the other hand, looked at him the whole time, at his long body sprawled against the pillows, almost losing it when he pulled himself forward to kiss my erection.

He slid lower on the bed and I poured oil over myself and moved over him. He spread and pulled his legs up, brushing his thighs along my hips, making me quickly grip his hip and begin pushing into him. I listened to the quiet sounds he made, his intense breathing as we moved together to get me inside.

I buried my face in his shoulder and tightened my hand across his throat, gently, so I could feel his cries in the palm of my hand, down the length of my arm. I pulled out and pushed in, memorized every movement he made against my body, his legs around my waist, his fingers digging then trembling loose from my back.

He arched as I worked across his shoulders and neck and jaw until I could concentrate on nothing except the feeling of thrusting into him. I sank my teeth into him and squeezed my eyes shut and it got sweeter and sweeter, until I was nothing but hot and liquid, until I was convulsing in his arms.

As we laid there some time later, his breaths fanning my hair and his fingers lazily stroking my back, neither of us said anything. I had given him comfort and he had given me a fall from grace. But it was all right, because it was our mortal condition. Tomorrow I would put him back on his pedestal and go offering contrition to God.

~*~

 _End_


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